24 Jul 11 Tolstoy and the Last Station of Modernity

Tolstoy and the Last Station of Modernity

August 15, 2010

After seeing several months ago the movie “The Last Station,” by the director Michael Hoffman, based on Leo Tolstoy’s final year of life and his death at the train station of Astapovo in 1910, I found my thoughts often turning to him. I’ve had a long interest in Tolstoy and his work, having spent considerable time as a student reading large swaths of his journals and other more obscure books during the early 1970s and repeatedly going back to him during intervening years. While the acting of Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer was superb, the latter of whom I admire having seen Plummer perform live a couple of times at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada, the movie left me with an uneasy feeling regarding the interpretation of Tolstoy. The film script was based on Jay Parini’s novel, The Last Station, which may be part of the problem, in turn perhaps tracing back to the unsympathetic biographies by Henry Troyat and R. N. Wilson, both derisively presenting Tolstoy as a religious crank and fanatic. Neither biography understands the full weight of who Tolstoy was and what he actually believed and why. Touching on the problem, fearing other biographers would repeat the errors of Troyat, Tolstoy’s daughter Alexandra wrote in 1968, in The Real Tolstoy, that “Troyat . . . shows no respect for Tolstoy’s inner life. He speaks about it in vulgar, cynical expressions…. I fear that the errors in Troyat’s book will be repeated in other works.” Beyond the biographies, skewing also the movie, lies the pervasive nihilism and cynicism of modernity that has no respect or appreciation for any spiritual vision of life, including even a highly universal one, such as Tolstoy’s, for he had embraced, by the last decade of his life, the universal principles and teachings, not only of Christianity, but of all the great religions. To see or set him in a more limited context is to fail to understand him within his own stated terms and the plenitude and scope of his work.

Born of aristocratic lineage, Tolstoy inherited his elite position in Russian society, along with the enormous estate of Yasnaya Polyana, south of Moscow. At thirty-four in 1862, he married Sophia Behrs, when she was eighteen years old. By all accounts they lived a happy domestic life together for many years. After his crisis of faith, discussed in My Confessions (1878), while he found the answers for his spiritual and intellectual struggles in his religious studies and books, they began to experienced an increasingly strained relationship. Sophia’s personality was much given, as she described herself, to the lightness of the social world she had been born into, growing up in Moscow in the circles of the Tsar’s court. By her own recognition, Tolstoy had a much deeper inner life of the mind and sensibility. Their relationship was often strained for the rest of their lives. Torn between love and gratitude to her and a desire to bring his life and ideals in line with his beliefs, he and Sophia struggled on together. In a letter dated June 8, 1897, found concealed in his study after his death, published in Paris in Figaro, December 27, 1910, which Tolstoy apparently had never sent to Sophia, Tolstoy dreamed about leaving her and explained his motives better than he eventually did when he actually left her more than a decade later:

For a long time, dear Sophie, I have been suffering from the discord between my life and my beliefs. I cannot force you to change your life or your habits. Neither have I hitherto been able to leave you, for I felt that by my departure I should deprive the children, still very young, of the little influence I might be able to exert over them, and also that I should cause you all a great deal of pain. But I cannot continue to live as I have lived, during these last sixteen years, now struggling against you and irritating you, now succumbing myself to the influences and the seductions to which I am accustomed and which surround me. I have resolved now to do what I have wished to do for a long time: to go away. . . . Just as the Hindoos, when they arrive at the sixtieth year, go away into the forest; just as every aged and religious man, wishes to consecrate the last years of hislife to God and not to jesting, punning, family tittletattle, and lawn-tennis, so do I with all my strength desire peace and solitude, and if not an absolute harmony at least not this crying discord between my whole life and my conscience. (Tolstoy, Romain Rolland, p. 181)

Tolstoy similarly once wrote to his sister, who was a nun in the Russian Orthodox Church, “How fine for the Buddhist when he grows old—he goes off to the desert.” It was to his sister and the Shamardino monastery that Tolstoy first fled in 1910, though he quickly gave up on the notion of staying there and headed south towards his summer home in the Crimea. What is often lost sight of in our disbelieving age is that religious retreat in advanced years was an ideal that Tolstoy respected and wished to honor in fact and deed. Sophia, it should be noted, was diagnosed by more than one doctor as mentally ill, a fact recognized by his son Sergei in a letter to his father, after his flight in 1910, acknowledging that it would have been better had they separated many years earlier. The movie fails to do justice to this complexity, presenting Sophia as far too much the victimized realist of an impractical zealot of a husband. What has come to be a common interpretation of Tolstoy is completely false. That Tolstoy could continue to study and write under such conditions is a testament to the strength and integrity of his character and soul.

Like many writers, Tolstoy anguished, for years, over his inability to bring his life into balance with his ideals. Alexandra quotes from his private diary the following passage:

If I heard about myself from the outside, as of a person, living in luxury, with police guards, grabbing all he could from the peasants, putting them in the lockup, and professing and preaching Christianity, and handing out small coins, and hiding behind a sweet wife while I did all these base things—I could not but call him a scoundrel! And that is what I have had to submit to, so that I could free myself from human fame and live for the sake of my soul. (Tolstoy: A Life of My Father, 1953, p. 466)

On another occasion, he writes, “Help me, O Lord. Again I yearn to go away, and I dare not. Nor can I give up.” These passages demonstrate the extent to which he fought for years with the dilemmas of his own existence, seeking resolution, some way out and forward. His inheriting great wealth and position became for him a burden and contradiction of the sincerity of his religious beliefs, as they developed and evolved, and weighed heavily upon him. Eventually, seeking to free himself, he legally passed ownership of his estate and holdings to Sophia and the family. All his religious writings, several books and many pamphlets, plays, and short stories can be properly understood only when approached in the light of this struggle. It explains why he lived in such a simple way that many visitors to Yasnaya Polyana recorded their surprise upon actually meeting him and witnessing it for themselves. The only solution for Tolstoy was what it was and is for all great writers. He had to write his way through his dilemmas, create for himself the role and persona that resolved his deepest conflicts, and those of his time. That is what all the religious works are about. By the end of his last decade, he’s achieved it, and then, finally, he’s ready, to follow the way of the ancients, set an example, remind the world, in deed as well as word, of the spiritual journey of life, round out the fullness of his own life.

By Tolstoy’s own testimony, after the years of happiness with Sophia, after writing his early novels and stories, including War and Peace and most of Anna Karenina, he experienced a searing spiritual crisis, feeling his life had become meaningless, which impelled him on a search for meaning and purpose. As recounted in My Confessions(1878), during his early years prior to his marriage, he states,

I killed people in war and challenged to duels to kill; I lost money at cards, wasting the labour of the peasants ; I punished them, fornicated, and cheated. Lying, stealing, acts of lust of every description, drunkenness, violence, murder — There was not a crime which I did not commit, and for all that I was praised, and my contemporaries have regarded me as a comparatively moral man.

He further emphasizes that he reached a point where “life had no meaning at all.” Overwhelmed by the emptiness of his existence, he turned to the study of philosophy, but eventually came to believe that there must be more than reason:

From the beginning of the human race, wherever there is life, there is the faith which makes life possible and everywhere the leading characteristics of that faith are the same.

From his study of Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, as early as 1879, Tolstoy arrives at the understanding that he is “a part of the infinite whole” and in “the answers given by faith was to be found the deepest source of human wisdom,” while rejecting “the unnecessary and unreasonable doctrines” that had crept into all of the great religions. Initially, he returns to the Russian Orthodox Church, but soon finds it suffered from many irrational doctrines, what he would call after his 1901 excommunication “sorcery,” leading to his quest for the truth of Christianity, and all religions, that lasted until the end of his life in 1910.

A hundred years later, part of the difficulty many people may have in understanding Tolstoy involves today the pervasive nihilism of the academic and cultural establishment, which since Tolstoy’s death, has continued to drain away all spiritual import and nuance, not merely from Tolstoy’s work, but from literature and life. Western civilization itself has become suffused with nihilism, identified with it, the ruling myth celebrated everywhere has become the ascendance and triumphalism of a gloriously secular nihilism, passing the disease around the world, to all countries and cultures, so that the remedy can now only be found and administered in a truly global context. Far beyond the confines of the literary, intellectual, academic milieu, East or West, the ethos of nihilism, inculcated into the young and the general culture, pervades, in its local variants, every region of the globe. Tolstoy himself was highly aware that the general direction of culture was set in a direction away from religious belief and understood his efforts as a response to it, as when he said of Nietzsche, “What savagery! It is terrible, so to drag down Christianity!” Similarly, Tolstoy rejected the applicability of a solely materialistic understanding of the human being, whether by Marx or Thomas Henry Huxley’s defense of Charles Darwin in his Romanes Lectures of 1894. Tolstoy states, “the law of evolution runs counter to the moral law: This was known to the ancient Greeks and Hindus. The philosophy and religion of both those peoples brought them to the doctrine of self-renunciation.” It was often against the decline of a spiritual and moral understanding of the human being that Tolstoy understood himself as writing and working, though even he underestimated the force of nihilism as manifested in 1917. In a preface to Tolstoy’s short novels, Philip Rahv observed, “Tolstoy resisted the catastrophic ruin of the traditional order by straining all the powers of his reason to discover a way out.”

As recorded in an often-cited journal entry, the idea had already occurred to Tolstoy when he was twenty-seven years old that the world needed a new religion, one purged of the false doctrines of organized Christianity:

A new religion corresponding with the present state of mankind; the religion of Christ but purged of dogmas and mysticism–a practical religion, not promising future bliss but giving bliss on earth.

After his religious crisis, as early as 1884, he took note of his intention of compiling the sayings of religious sages and thinkers into a single volume. During the last decade of his life, he finally began the compilation in earnest, resulting in several different versions of it, variously titled, Thoughts of Wise Men, A Calendar of Wisdom, A Circle of Reading, with the final edition in 1910, The Path of Life. Tolstoy spent much of his energy on the book, compiling and refining. He himself considered it as the most important work of his life, as he once wrote, “If it is granted me to finish this work, it will be a complete statement of my world outlook.” He continually simplified and revised the quotations and passages to the point that he advised translators not to look for the original pieces in Confucius, Buddhism, or wherever, but to base their translations on his own free-renderings. Near the end of his life, far ahead of his time, he couldn’t understand why people didn’t use The Circle of Reading more. While he understood that a writer cannot create his own religion, he was caught in the dilemma of finding all the existing forms unfulfilling.

Throughout the last thirty years of his life, Tolstoy was opposed to the violence in Russia advanced by the radicals, Marxists, and socialists of his time. In a journal entry he writes,

Socialists will never destroy poverty and the injustice of the inequality of capacities. The strongest and more intelligent will always make use of the weaker and the more stupid. Justice and equality in the good things of life will never be achieved by anything less than Christianity, i.e., by negating oneself and recognizing the meaning of one’s life in service to others.

His background in and experience of the ruling aristocratic class and ethos provided Tolstoy with an acute understanding of power and its endless corruptions. Far from being naive about power in society, he understood that human beings had to have a change of heart to influence society at the deepest level. The bombs and bullets of the revolutionaries were anathema to him and would produce only another tyranny, as they indeed did, one of the most horrible and blood-thirsty tyrannies in the history of humanity. Elsewhere, Tolstoy observed, “The object of socialism is the satisfaction of the lowest needs of man: his material well being. And it cannot attain even this end by the means it recommends.” Similarly, in “An Appeal,” “Even if that should happen which Marx predicted, then the only thing that will happen is that despotism will be passed on. Now the capitalists are ruling, but then the directors of the working class will rule.” In 1905 in “The End of the Age,” he wrote, “Nothing demonstrates so clearly the increasing enslavement of nations as the growth, spread, and success of socialistic theories.” By the last decade of his life, he had long since concluded that only a deep spiritual change could truly ameliorate the condition of humanity.

Arguing always against the violence of socialism and the Marxists, Tolstoy, unfortunately, interpreted the New Testament in such a way that non-resistance to violence prevented him from being sufficiently practical enough to recognize the value of a more democratic order, causing him to advocate a type of Christian anarchism and to repudiate Russian efforts to create a democratic body, the Duma, in the early years of the twentieth century. He also, unfortunately, aligned himself with much of the thinking of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin and the anti-tax thinker Henry George. Like Dostoyevsky, he really didn’t understand the West. As others have remarked, a few trips to Europe and England failed to take him deep enough into the social and political culture. Both he and Dostoevsky were too quick to resort to Catholicism as a whipping boy to explain every flaw of the West. I cannot but feel, given the subsequently bloody Soviet history, the country and people would have been better off had Tolstoy been more moderate and realistic about the necessities of life and government. Still, the Christian anarchism of Tolstoy was infinitely more gentle than what Lenin instituted in 1917. In the end, Russia has come full circle back to most of the issues that Tolstoy struggled with, as has the 21st Century.

Tolstoy significantly located what he believed the only way forward in universality—the recognition that the human being is a spiritual being, grounded in the necessity of moral choice and growth toward perfection, as in all the great religions. Our global, pluralistic age lives this truth even as it fails sufficiently to recognize and articulate it to the level required to help understand the nature of life in our time. Perhaps more than any other piece he wrote, published in 1902, Tolstoy explains the religious philosophy he came to hold in What Is Religion, and Wherein Lies Its Essence?

Religions differ in their external forms, but they are all alike in their fundamental principles. And it is these principles, that are fundamental to all religions, that form the true religion which alone at the present time is suitable for us all, and the adoption of which alone can save men from their ills….

Having by this time written several major books and numerous articles on religion, struggling with Christian history and doctrine, his own excommunication in 1901 by the Orthodox Church, Tolstoy was uniquely qualified by fiery experience and study to set forth his increasingly universal beliefs:

The principles of this true religion are so natural to men, that as soon as they are put before them they are accepted as something quite familiar and self-evident. For us the true religion is Christianity in those of its principles in which it agrees, not with the external forms, but with the basic principles of Brahmanism, Confucianism, Taoism, Hebraism, Buddhism, and even Mohammedanism. And just in the same way, for those who profess Brahmanism, Confucianism, etc.—true religion is that of which the basic principles agree with those of all other religions. And these principles are very simple, intelligible and clear.

In this sense, referring to the thinking of Tolstoy, as is often done, as Christian anarchism is a distortion of what the man really believed —spiritual universality, or Christianity universalized, might be better terms, represented best by the same universal spirit he labored to articulate in A Calendar of Wisdom (tr. Peter Sekirin, 1997). Defining universally held principles, he states,

These principles are that there is a God, the origin of all things; that in man dwells a spark from that Divine Origin, which man, by his way of living, can increase or decrease in himself; that to increase this divine spark man must suppress his passions and increase love in himself; and that the practical means to attain this result is to do to others as you would they should do to you. All these principles are common to Brahmanism, Hebraism, Confucianism, and Mohammedanism. (If Buddhism supplies no definition of God, it nevertheless acknowledges That with which man commingles, and into Which he is absorbed when he attains to Nirvana. So, That with which man commingles, or into Which he is absorbed in Nirvana, is the same Origin that is called God in Hebraism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism.)

Repeatedly and everywhere in Tolstoy’s writing, clearing away the debris of such ephemera as anarchism, one finds his emphasis on the Golden Rule as the essential teaching of all wisdom traditions and religions. Just as lucidly and consistently, Tolstoy understood the importance of reason and that true religion does not subvert it to “sorcery” and other irrationalities:

Religion is not a belief, settled once for all, in certain supernatural occurrences supposed to have taken place once upon a time, nor in the necessity for certain prayers and ceremonies; nor is it, as the scientists suppose, a survival of the superstitions of ancient ignorance, which in our time has no meaning or application to life ; but religion is a certain relation of man to eternal life and to God, a relation accordant with reason and contemporary knowledge, and it is the one thing that alone moves humanity forward towards its destined aim.

Tolstoy utterly opposed the caricatures of faith and religion by modern scientism, believing  as Ernest J. Simmons remarked that “one of the main calamities of modern life” was “the tendency to replace moral and spiritual progress by technical progress.” His trust in and search for rational truth enabled him to see through both the irrationalities and blind-faith of organized religion and of modern science to the universality of the human spirit. He was, in a sense, an early modern seeker of the spiritual unity of the great religions, preceding and akin to the Perennial philosophy of Aldous Huxley and others, but less given to the esoteric, closer to the approach of Huston Smith, superior even to him, I would say, though admittedly their gifts are different.

When I think of Tolstoy’s spiritual journey and of earlier times and cultures, of writers struggling with what is universal in the human being, I think of Dara Shikoh in Mughal India, seeking unity of Hinduism and Islam, as in hisThe Mingling of the Two Oceans (1657), the universality of the Sufi poets, or of the Dali Lama’s recent book Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World’s Religions Can Come Together (2010). As reported by Tolstoy’s daughter Alexandra, almost his last gasping words were “To seek, always to seek.” In the sense of the psychiatrist Victor Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he was one who never ceased searching for truth. Far from a religious organization and all that that implies, Tolstoy conceived of religious belief in rational, reasonable terms, opposed to organized Christianity, as when he wrote, “Men of our modern world who profess this perverted form of Christianity really believe in nothing at all. And that is the peculiar character of our time.” That is why he relentlessly argued against the distortions that he believed had come to exist in the doctrines of institutional Christianity, in favor of a more humanistic, open conception of faith. In “The End of the World,” putting aside “false Christianity,” Tolstoy looked forward to “true Christianity,” one freed from “sorcery,” universal in scope and outlook:

I think that at present—at this very time—the life of the Christian nations is near to the limit dividing the old epoch which is ending from the new which is beginning. I think that now at this very time that great revolution has begun which for almost 2000 years has been preparing in all Christendom; a revolution consisting in the replacing of false Christianity and the consequent power of one portion of mankind and the slavery of another, —by true Christianity and the consequent recognition of that equality and true liberty which are natural to all rational beings.

All the more reason why the caricature of Tolstoy in “The Last Station” jarred so incongruously against my understanding of who the man actually was, in and of himself, as articulated in his own writings, over the entire last half of his life, especially the last decade. It was also the real Tolstoy who meant so much to Ghandi, the one who emphasized spirituality, love, peace, and non-resistance to evil. “His secret is that he is the last of the unalienated artists,” Philip Rahv insightfully observed. Similarly, Saul Bellow remarked on the extent to which Tolstoy was “healthy,” far from the “adversarial” writers of Lionel Trilling.

Now more than ever, after centuries of falling down into the bottomless pit of nihilism, the world needs to recover the vision of universality, what the great religions and people of the various countries and cultures have in common. For all too long, humanity has been obsessed with what distinguishes and separates, what divides people from one another, setting up our little racial, nationalistic gods and idols. Tolstoy was interested in what we have in common, what unifies our vision, hoping thereby to elevate and improve, to whatever degree possible, our actions. It is long past time that the world re-affirm human unity. Tolstoy provides a significant part of the perspective required to achieve it.

Alexandra reports in her book Tolstoy: A Life of My Father (1953) that he had a visitor in February of 1909 who was a Bahai, a member of a faith that emphasizes what is universal in all religions:

“Actually, when you think of it,” Father said, “you are always astonished that such a simple argument does not come to your mind. Take an Orthodox Christian, a Catholic, a Buddhist—all of them believing in what they hold to be the truth. Yet if I cross a certain boundary—I think that the one is a lie, the other the truth. What doubts that arouses, what need to search out the religion which would be common to all!” (472)

Alexandra continues that her father had worked unrelentingly on The Circle of Reading precisely because he was seeking “what was basic to all religions,” trying “to lay the foundation for one religion.” It is important to stress that the Bahai faith that Tolstoy responded to was not what is known to many people today as the Baha’i Faith, the highly organized hierarchy located in Haifa, Israel, merely one of several Bahai denominations, which has become exactly the kind of exclusive religious organization that Tolstoy vehemently condemned in all his writings. Rather, Tolstoy responded to the open and inclusive association and movement that existed under Abdul-Baha, the son of the founder of the Bahai faith, Baha’u’llah, who died in 1892 in present-day Israel. Until his own death in 1921, Abdul-Baha brought his father’s vision into the Western, modern world, showing the way beyond its Islamic and Sufi heritage, emphasizing universality, “spiritual democracy,” the “oneness of religion,” and the freedom of the individual soul in self-less love and service to humanity, as in other persuasions. Tolstoy’s papers establish that as early as 1894, he had heard of the Bahai movement, which traces its origin to 1863, with many Bahai contacts extending until the end of his life, including his receipt of books, letters, articles, and visitors familiar with the Bahai teachings, along with the droves of other people visiting Yasnaya Polyana. Reported by Tolstoy’s personal physician, Dushan Makovitsky, in his diary, for May 15, 1910, Tolstoy observed in his presence that the Bahai movement was “Very profound. I know of no other so profound” (Vol. 4, p. 255). Honesty makes it incumbent on all trying to enlist him under their banner to recognize as well that Tolstoy is on record as writing, “I know the Bahai Teachings, and I am in agreement with its basic principles, except for the belief in the infallibility of its founders, and a few other details” (Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, Vol 81, p. 77).

Many people today still commonly think in terms of “your” religion, and “my” religion, as in “the” religion, “the” exclusive truth, while the deepest meaning of universality is “our” religion, not, to be clear, even “my” own personal Bahai persuasion, which is but one form of universality, conceived of as neutral territory, or “yours,” whether any type of transcendence, atheism, nihilism or whatever. Universality embraces all persuasions. That is its great challenge. And it is not relativism. The tendency always is to think of religion in terms of organized or institutional religion, which isn’t religion at all. True religion can only be personal, and as pluralistic as the Golden Rule. Take the person out of it and it is no longer religion. In the modern world, even throughout human history, true religion has never been organized. It is not the nature of spirituality to take over and dominate the communal, collective space. And it definitely can not ever be organized.  For it is, as Tolstoy understood so well, about the individual soul and his or her inmost relation to the Divine. The astonishing development of religious history, I want to say revelation, is that it is the Will of God that religion not be organized. Everywhere people are against organized religion for countless good reasons, as was Tolstoy. He and most people, if interested in religion, not the falsities and sophistries of exclusive institutional doctrine, want the true thing of the heart. That doesn’t mean oppressively organized religion, anathema to the soul.

The deepest insight of human experience remains, “Truth is One; sages call it by many names.” The Divine Being transcends all human conceptions. We truly need every human attempt to understand Him, Her, It, yet even then, in all humility, have the dimmest hope of fully understanding. It is precisely the defense-reaction of the cynicism of modernity, as Victor Frankl insightfully observes, that rejects the meaningfulness of life, believing all religions are false, delusional, contemptible fantasies. From Freud, Marx, sundry sociologists and many others, science debased to the substitute religion of scientism, the verdict and message is almost invariably condescension and contempt. As Julien Benda observed in The Betrayal of the Clerks (1927), modernity derides any spiritual vision, including Tolstoy’s. Benda, though, remained limited by the exclusivism of his own Catholic universalism, a limited form of universality. Far from such a limitation, Tolstoy arrived at the last station of modernity, universality, long before he arrived at the station of Astapovo, long before the rest of humanity began to catch up. Though we may still first blow up much of the world, global modernity is increasingly catching up with Tolstoy, however unknowingly, pulling into the last station of humanity.

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: Baha'i Faith, Christopher Plummer, Frederick Glaysher, Helen Mirren, Last Station, Leo Tolstoy, Russian Literature, Tolstoy, Viktor Frankl, Yasnaya Polyana

22 Jul 11 Of True Religion. John Milton.

Of True Religion and John Milton.

February 7, 2010

In 1673, a year before his death, John Milton published a pamphlet entitled “Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and what the best means may be used against the Growth of Popery.” His great poems were all behind him, death before him. Oddly, this pamphlet is little known to the general reader of Milton. After looking through a number of textbook collections of Milton for university courses, published during the last several decades, I was surprised to discover none of them contained “Of True Religion,” yet it was the last piece the man ever wrote. All the more startling is that “Of True Religion” presents a portrait of John Milton significantly at variance with the Puritan caricature of him that is often promoted by scholars in the university. All too often Milton is torn out of his historical time and not seen to be in fact the liberal that he was, clearly headed toward the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which further limited the monarchy and prepared the way for the modern efflorescence of individual liberty and freedom. To distort Milton into a one-dimensional Puritan suppresses the complexity of his actual thinking and life.

Since I visited last summer Milton’s home in Chalfont St. Giles, where he had lived fleeing the London plague of 1665, he was on my mind in the fall, and I was browsing online to see what I could turn up about him. I stumbled onto “Of True Religion” when I had downloaded a 19th Century edition of Milton’s prose, published in 1826, from Google Books. There it was in the table of contents. I suppose it was still possible back then for “true religion” to exist. How curious. I looked in my 1977 college edition of Merritt Y. Hughes’ Complete Poems and Major Prose, first published in 1957. Apparently, not major. In his opinion. After transferring it to my Sony Reader, to my surprise, I found Milton talking about toleration, leaving alone the “Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Socinians” and Arminians, instead of persecuting them, harrying them out of the land, emphasizing what is held in common, versus sectarian. And how far should they be tolerated? “Doubtless equally, as being all Protestants.” He further stressed they should be allowed to preach and argue in their assemblies, public writings and printing. From our perspective, one might say, of course, but Milton was progressive and on the advancing edge of his day. To fail to recognize that fact obscures who he was.

Milton’s qualification is Protestantism. It’s fair to say Milton does not have much warmth of feeling for “popery,” or Catholicism in general, tending to vehement and even feverish denunciation. He’s concerned, like many in his time, with the grasping for “usurped” ecclesiastical and political power. He calls to mind for his readers England’s history under Catholicism when he writes that the pope “was wont to drain away the greatest part of the wealth of this then miserable land . . . to maintain the pride and luxury of his court and prelates.” Milton was not the kind of man to take lightly the “Babylonish yoke” of popery, or anything else for that matter. My English genes cannot but thrill in agreement and admiration for his spirited defense of liberty. However, it’s safe to say, I suspect, that while Milton was willing to extend freedom of conscience to fellow Protestants, which many of the time were not, he probably would have thought differently when it came to Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and people of other persuasions, lumping them all in there somewhere with popery—“idolatrous.” The ruined abbeys all over England stand witness to both the extent of Catholic exploitation and the fierce backlash it inspired. Milton is tame by comparison. But no universality for him. Milton was convinced he had the exclusive truth in Protestantism.

Similarly, some today, trying to revive or return to Christianity, as a dominant social organization, celebrate Milton, thinking he is the way back to an idealized past. But the past is past because it is past. There’s no going back in that direction. Why would one want to? The democratic pluralism of our time is much more dynamic and exciting, and, here’s the important fact, true. True religion, in our time, must recognize the non-exclusivism of religious truth—that all peoples, religions, and traditions taught and held, still hold and teach, to the degree they’re not atrophied or undermined by the nihilism of modernity, the same universal, spiritual insights, ideals, virtues, and truths. Far from exclusivism, far from the historicism and nihilism that attempted to discredit all religions and wisdom traditions, I aver, not that all religions are false, but that they’re all true.

With a nod to the long line of both Croatian Catholics and persecuted Huguenots that I also come from, I would say the great religions all provide a vision and understanding of the purpose of life, what it means to be a human being, that is deeply profound, non-utopian, non-quixotic, when properly understood, of how and why one journeys through this world. We need to know as much about the Unknowable Essence as possible, from every angle, every insight into Divine Mystery, that we might come to understand Him or Her or It, just a little bit more. I’m not willing to settle for anything less than the fullness of Being, striving for It. To relinquish the thousands of years of human meditation on the Divine Being would be too great a loss. What then the point of life? The Exclusive Truth is beyond all attempts to understand Him. I also argue for retention of all the nay-sayers, atheists, agnostics, and nihilists. They have an important part of the truth to tell, while having no more the exclusive truth than anyone else. Relax, there’s no reason to burn them at the stake or blow them up. Nor anyone.

While Milton urges Protestants, “who agree in the main,” to show forth “forbearance and charity one towards the other,” I would urge forbearance and charity for all, all the great religions and traditions, for this is what the logical, rational, reasonable development of modern democratic pluralism has already done, though we do not, I think, recognize and celebrate it for the highly significant achievement that it is. Too often, global society continues, in a sense, to think and act in terms of exclusivism, whether religious or secular, while more often in its lived experience rightly recognizing and respecting the multifarious ways and paths through life. To make our achievement more conscious and acknowledged, indeed, more than mere toleration, celebrated, is one of the challenges and goals of the 21st Century, all times, and a path toward universal peace and understanding. Understandably, the countervailing fear is usually about organization. But in the modern world people have increasingly come to realize that true religion is merely an “attitude toward divinity,” a frame of mind, a reverence for life, not an organization, best manifested as a distinctive quality of the individual.

Putting aside organizations and institutions, Milton writes, “True religion is the true worship and service of God, learnt and believed from the word of God only.” Unfortunately drawing from Paul of Tarsus, Milton embraces some of Paul’s more personal ideas and interpretations, and of the early Christian church, “to reject all other traditions,” instead of universality. Similar to the harm Paul’s teachings on misogyny have caused throughout the centuries, Paul’s bifurcation of humanity, into the “elect” and the “wayward,” has caused incalculable suffering and misery, all in the name of putative truth. All of the various forms in various traditions that have approached human nature in a similar manner have resulted invariably in analogous distortions and social dislocations, though his many good acts and writings conducive to cultivating love and community are timeless. Milton is at his best when he’s following what is universal in the Christian tradition.

Milton’s other prose writings helped disenfranchise the church from the state. He and the time understood well the threat and result of fanatical exclusivity in power, or grasping for it, as we do living now, as a result of the fanatical exclusivism of Islamist terrorism, reminding us of how serious all these issues really are. Separation of church and state is one of the undeniably great achievements of civilization, even, I would say, the Will of God. From lived experience, life just goes better when matters of conscience and belief are balanced with different viewpoints, consultation, people of various religious outlooks, and no religious faith or belief, the full range of human thought and belief; the great pool of humanity, swirling around, trying to make sense of it all, no one shoving the exclusive truth down anyone else’s throat, over the barrel of a gun, or with a bomb. What could be more obvious about our actual experience of what works, what produces a peaceful, harmonious society, or, at least, as close as we can get to one in this world? Even for Milton, the great fear was slipping back into popery or anything oppressive and tyrannical. Not liberal by our standards today, but he was, by those of his own time, and headed in the right direction.

Frederick Glaysher

 

 

Tags: ebooks, exclusivism, Google Books, John Milton, Of True Religion, Post-Gutenberg Age, Protestant, Religious truth, Universalism, universality

20 Jul 11 Roadside Dog. Czeslaw Milosz.

Czeslaw Milosz

A Roadside Dog. Czeslaw Milosz.

Antinomies…. October 24, 2000

In A Year of the Hunter, Czeslaw Milosz unequivocally writes, “Poetry’s separation from religion has always strengthened my conviction that the erosion of the cosmic-religious imagination is not an illusion and that the vast expanses of the planet that are falling away from Christianity are the external correlative of this erosion.” Road-Side Dog exudes this same consciousness, yet, interested only in Christianity, he fails to perceive that vast expanses of the planet have also left behind the Islamic, Hindu, Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist religions.

Like his contemporaries, Milosz is a child of dualities and contradictions, as he discloses in Unattainable Earth: “Sometimes believing, sometimes not believing, / With others like myself I unite in worship.” Though “loyal and disloyal,” he performs what is in itself an act of affirmation. One reason for such tensions must be his recognition that we are “In an intermediary phase, after the end of one era and before the beginning of a new one.” In another entry he writes, “There is only one theme: an era is coming to an end which lasted nearly two thousand years, when religion had primacy of place in relation to philosophy, science and art. . . .” Milosz recognizes the validity of his own honest doubts and the abyss of evil and historical calamity that is swallowing everything before it, yet he does so while continuing to “unite in worship.” Similarly, in “Lecture V” of The Collected Poems, the persona affirms “We plod on with hope,” and then allows, “And now let everyone / Confess to himself. eHas he risen?’ eI don’t know.’” It was perhaps these lines that led Pope John Paul II to say to Milosz, as he reports in A Year of the Hunter, “You always take one step forward and one step back.” In an essay in New Perspectives Quarterly, Milosz describes himself as a believer, while in A Year of the Hunter he refers to an experience in church on Palm Sunday as an “intuitive understanding that Christ exists.” These contradictions achieve their fullest expression in “Two Poems” in Provinces: The first poem celebrates earthly life and its values, while the second poem, “A Poem for the End of the Century,” bitterly, ironically recalls the religious past. Of these two contrasting poems, Milosz writes in a headnote that “taken together” they “testify to my contradictions, since the opinions voiced in one and the other are equally mine.” To highlight either side over the other would be a distortion of his psyche. Milosz conveyed his complexity to the Pope when he replied, “Can one write religious poetry in any other way today?” I have often thought of Virginia Woolf’s Mr. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse, ascending the island rocks, exclaiming, in one of the most poignant settings of modern literature, “There is no God.”

Perhaps because Milosz perceives our age as an intermediary one, he finds it more possible than most poets to hold out hope for the future. His hope, though, as we have seen, is not naive, foolish, or unaware of the incessant disintegration. It is that of one tried by experience, who yet believes there are reasons for such a poem as “Thankfulness.” To give “thanks for good and ill” manifests a trust that transcends our usual human self-centeredness and that submits to the power of the mystery of being, a trust that acknowledges in another poem “They are incomprehensible, the things of this earth.” Such trust is also the prerequisite to finding “Eternal light in everything on earth.” Although from the viewpoint of traditional Catholic belief some might think such lines are suffused with vague gnosticism, accuse him of having fallen off from the faith, of “willing belief,” as he says of himself in The Land of Ulro, one must recognize the honest complexity of his commitment if one wishes to confront, as he has, the undeniable damage that has been visited upon all organized forms of religion and government during the modern era.

In reference to religion, while recognizing the undeniable damage, Milosz has often expressed his skepticism and uneasiness with Catholicism. Although he seems to favor at times reversion to Catholicism, suggests he himself is a heretic, harbors the conceit of possessing the true truth among the great religions, he also writes of going “forward, but on a different track,” of a “new vision,” “a new awareness,” “new perspectives,” as in A Year of the Hunter:

Why should we shut our eyes and pretend, rejecting theobvious, that Ancient Rome is again in decline, and this time it’s not pagan Rome under the blows of Christianity, but the Rome of the monotheists’ God? Since this, and nothing else, is the undeclared theme of contemporary poetry in various languages, obviously this conflict has already crossed the threshold of universal consciousness. . . . Perhaps . . . new perspectives will open up . . . .

Milosz has worked more deeply with the spiritual dislocations of modern life than any other poet of the twentieth century since T. S. Eliot.

In regard to government, Milosz’s experience prepared him to understand where we have been and where we are going in a manner unique among modern poets. All the more eloquently rings his plea in his Nobel Lecture for sanity eventually to prevail among the nations of the earth:

We realize that the unification of our planet is in the making, and we attach importance to the notion of international community. The days when the League of Nations and the United Nations were founded deserve to be remembered.

This realization of the importance of international community can be found throughout his writings. Its source, beyond his own experience, was, by his own testimony, his uncle, Oscar Milosz, poet and seer, who predicted the “triumph of the Roman Catholic Church.” Narrow Catholic hopes aside, history, lower case, moves toward the vindication of both of them, as well as of all those who have stood throughout this century for the further development of international institutions through which the nations may cooperate for the protection of the weak and vulnerable, for the protection of the little ones. If “There are no direct lessons that American poets can learn from Milosz,” the fault lies entirely with us and the age of academic criticism that has almost strangled the life out of poetry.

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: A Roadside Dog, Collected Poems, Czeslaw Milosz, League of Nations, New Perspectives Quarterly, Nobel Lecture, To The Lighthouse, United Nations, Virginia Woolf, Year of the Hunter

19 Jul 11 Poetry of Arechi. Ryuichi Tamura.

Poetry of Arechi. Ryuichi Tamura.

Vanishing…. October 12, 2000

For Japan and its writers, the modern darkness deepens during the period of military fascism and World War II. With the defeat and unconditional surrender, immense shock waves rocked the entire culture calling into question the pseudo-Shinto and Confucian values Japan had based its society on for almost a century. As writers returned from one front or another of the war, they found a Japan devastated by the Allied bombing. Maebashi, for instance, where I lived for a few years, was reduced to rubble along with its bridges. Before long, the entire country was restructured by the Occupation. Japanese writers now understood much more deeply the experience of the Western World War I generation. Better than any other postwar poet, Tamura Ryuichi (1923-1998) registers, since his own hometown in the suburbs of Tokyo no longer existed, the shock and disorientation of the modern Japanese psyche. Briefly a student of Hagiwara Sakutaro, Tamura had little interest in classical Japanese poetry, which emphasized the unity of man and nature, but read widely in Western literature and was especially influenced by T. S. Eliot, Steven Spender, C. Day Lewis, and W. H. Auden, the last of whom Tamura eventually met in New York in 1971. In a literary magazine called Arechi or “wasteland,” Tamura and other postwar poets gave voice to the despair and horror they felt, unequivocally stating, in an early manifesto, “The present is a wasteland.” The first poem in which Tamura finds his true voice and distance from his material is the prose poem “Etching,” published in 1956:

Now he sees a landscape he saw in a German etching it appears to be an aerial view of an ancient city between twilight and darkness or a realistic drawing of a modern-day cliff being taken from midnight toward dawn This man the one I began to describe killed his father when he was young that autumn his mother went beautifully insane (tr. Christopher Drake)

The critic Ikuko Atsumi has said of this poem that it aims at a universal vision of East and West, ancient and modern. The extreme nationalism of the Japanese fascists now defeated, the “he” can view the fullness or “landscape” of Western culture, specifically German, declining into “darkness” or rising as “a modern-day cliff,” ominous, dehumanized, marked by loss and angst. Atsumi suggests the father “possibly refers to the emperor system in Japan, and the mother he made beautifully insane to Japan’s aesthetic consciousness.” Like the West, the East too descended into a wasteland of madness and violence, the ancient now discredited and rendered nugatory. This is the “Etching” come to light, etched into Tamura’s consciousness and all postwar Japanese writers of worth. Blending together the perspective of the subjective “I” and objective “he,” aware of the horror, Tamura introduces into Japanese poetry a voice of detachment, observing life outside his own personal existence with meditative restraint, seeking a deeper understanding of modern human experience.

Having known and read Tamura’s work for more than fifteen years, I have often thought of him as akin somehow to Robert Lowell. He has a memory of Japan’s past that he never idealizes, but works with and probes it, pondering always without sentimentality the modern and by-gone days. Like Lowell and so many postmodern Western poets, Tamura also goes through a time of fairly formalistic writing, but he seems to outgrow it and returns to engaging universal experience outside his own little personal consciousness. Many other Japanese poets, as in the United States, are still stuck in such solipsism. Saigyo and Basho both believed poetry must consider the transcendent and involve conceptual knowledge outside the self, not merely aesthetic formalism. As late as 1982, in what is one of his greatest poems, “Spiral Cliff,” Tamura looks soberly at modern world history. After the speaker reflects on a photograph of a deer “falling off a cliff” and wonders “what’s after it,” he says,

Our century ends without decadence/ after the night and fog of Nazi gas chambers/ after Soviet forced labor camps/ after two U.S. atomic bombs on Japan/ there’s no thrill left in killing,/ no fear of the soul, no crime in adultery. . . .

In “our century,” the values requisite for perceiving and defining “decadence” have disappeared, “crime and evil disconnected,” all restraining sense of the soul lost. As a result, unimaginable horror has been perpetrated in every region of the globe on an appalling scale affecting both the social and individual realms. Like a roller coaster, “our century ends on pure speed.” Recalling the photo of the deer, he thinks,

I’m afraid of high places/ the cliff in me/ am I the hunter/ or the prey?

The “high places” are both those of earlier mentioned “boardrooms / of huge corporations,” East and West, in a manner reminiscent of Kaneko Mitsuharu’s Book of Mud, and the “modern-day cliff” of confusion, now “the cliff in me.” The ambiguity of the question “am I the hunter / or the prey?” acknowledges the complexity of modern life where all are somehow complicitous in human tragedy. Terrified by “blank paper,” by “what dreams will live and die there,” Tamura accepts the writer’s obligation to struggle for values worthy of all human beings, not just Japanese.

Next in dream half nightmare, he sees his own inner cliff protruding “between dreams / spiraling” down. Waking in the dawn, lying horizontally across the bed, he reads the morning newspaper full of massacre and civil war:

Vanishing/ cliff dream/ vertical dream/ elementally/ Gone

All the dreams have vanished as off the edge of a cliff. Vertical dreams have been replaced by the horizontal, exactly the information that fills the newspaper. Like the best of modern writers, W. H. Auden or Robert Lowell, Tamura has the honesty and strength of intellect and spirit to recognize it is all “gone.” I believe his vision of modern life and Japan is true, for it has been my own experience, lived not only in Japan but also in the United States, where “without decadence” the culture sinks to ever more dehumanized levels of violence, depravity, and social fragmentation. The importance of  Ryuichi Tamura’s poetry has not been sufficiently recognized in the West, nor in Japan.

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: Arechi, Hagiwara Sakutaro, Japan, Japanese, Poems, Poet, poetry, Ryuichi Tamura, Tamura, W. H. Auden

18 Jul 11 Silent Cry. Kenzaburo Oe.

Kenzaburo Oe

The Silent Cry: A Novel. Kenzaburo Oe.

The Global Cry…. June 24, 2000

Let me discuss “The Silent Cry” and Kenzaburo Oe’s work in general by first sketching in a broader view of Kenzaburo Oe’s literary interests.

No other Japanese writer has seen as deeply into Yukio Mishima’s suicide and the “vacuum” of modern Japanese life as has the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, Kenzaburo Oe:

“His death was a performance for the foreign audience, a very spectacular performance. The relationship between Mishima and the emperor system was rather dubious; the Japanese knew that. But from foreigners’ point of view–say, an American reader’s point of view–the Japanese emperor system is something inexplicable. Therefore, that final act by Mishima, tied in with the emperor system, appeared to be a kind of mystical thing. In actuality, he did it in order to entertain foreign readers.”

As in this excerpt from a 1986 interview, Oe, also influenced early on by Marxism and existentialism, especially Sartre, has had the vision and strength to confront in his writing not only the nostalgia of Mishima but also the past and present implications of the emperor system for Japan. In 1971 his novella “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears,” written just after Mishima’s suicide, courageously explores the nature and meaning of emperor worship. Having known Japanese students and friends who fiercely supported the emperor, loathed him, or were simply indifferent, with most falling into the last category, I believe it may be difficult for Americans to appreciate fully the scope of Oe’s achievement in this novella. Oe tried to convey the challenge of his theme when he wrote in an essay, “A man who criticises Mishima and his works must have the determination to criticise the total culture that orients itself toward the Imperial hierarchy.” Far from falling short of this determination, Oe creatively confronts the Japanese fascist and wartime past in “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears” and thereby truly serves the Japanese people and, I would argue, the emperor as well.

Oe grew up in a small village on the island of Shikoku where the events of “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears” and many of his stories take place. While in a Tokyo hospital dying of cancer, the persona narrates the densely complicated events of his father’s fervent devotion to the emperor, filtered through his own consciousness as a child and a mentally unbalanced adult recalling his “happy days.” His Japanese mother, who grew up in China, and whose own father was involved in the Daigaku Incident of 1910-11, an attempt to assassinate the emperor, believes her son has never been mentally stable since the age of three. Lying in his hospital bed, he recalls “hate-filled exchanges” between his mother and father about the role of his grandfather. Later in his life, she had always refused to discuss anything with her son about his father, a military official who returned from Manchuria a few years before the end of the war and who died attempting to lead an uprising in support of the emperor after his 1945 announcement of surrender on the radio. Respected by the village people, the father, suffering from cancer, secludes himself in the family storehouse. For the boy observing his father, he becomes a “kind of idol,” obedient to the emperor. After his older brother deserts in Manchuria, the boy shouts in defiance at his mother, “I don’t have no traitor’s blood in my veins”:

“Even now he could recall, with extreme vividness and reality . . . wanting to shout Long live the emperor! so that [his father] would acknowledge that it was his young son who was the true heir to his blood.”

Oe slowly leads the reader to the realization that the young boy has grown up to repeat the obsessions of the father, destroying himself in the process. When the mother, “a simple old country woman,” visits him as a thirty-five year old adult in the hospital, she struggles to no avail to get him to recognize what an absurd, cowardly figure his father actually was, while cancer literally and symbolically continues to eat him up. Near the end she says to the persona’s wife, whose own marriage and life have been ruined, “Sooner or later the Japanese are going to change their attitude about what happened, and I intend to live to see it, yessir! THIS IS THE DREAM. THIS MUST BE THE DREAM!” This is clearly the dream of Oe and many Japanese. He more than any other modern Japanese writer has had the courage to write fiction that might help Japan to accomplish it.

Also set mostly in Shikoku, The Silent Cry (1967), presents two brothers who return to their country village nestled in a valley. Although a dialectical struggle takes place between them, reminiscent of Dostoevski’s Brothers Karamazov, the older brother Mitsusaboro is the central figure of the novel, which is told from his point of view. In the opening paragraph, Mitsusaboro thinks to himself,

“Awakening in the predawn darkness, I grope among the anguished remnants of dreams that linger in my consciousness, in search of some ardent sense of expectation. Seeking in the tremulous hope of finding eager expectancy reviving in the innermost recesses of my being . . . still I find an endless nothing.”

He crawls into a hole dug for a septic tank and claws at the sides with his bare fingers trying to get the walls to cave in on himself. At the end of the summer his best friend, who had been injured in front of the Diet demonstrating against the Japan-US Mutual Security Treaty, had painted his head red, stuck a raw cucumber up the anus of his naked body, and hung himself. Mitsusaboro reflects, “And I too have the seeds of that same, incurable madness. . . .” Beginning in the hole, haunted by despair, madness, and nihilism, he gropes and searches throughout the novel for something worth living for. At dawn sticking his head up “two inches above the ground,” he notices,

“the backs of the dogwood leaves were a burning red… a red that reminded me of the flames in the picture of hell that I’d seen in our village temple every year on the Buddha’s Birthday. . . .

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: Bungaku, Fiction, Japan, Japanese, Kenzaburo Oe, Literature, Mishima, Shikoku, The Silent Cry, Yukio Mishima

17 Jul 11 Woman in the Dunes. Kobo Abe.

Kobo Abe

The Woman in the Dunes. Kobo Abe.

The Shifting Sands of Modernity…. June 24, 2000

Shortly after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 narrative writing became heavily influenced by Western literature. Although there are many excellent early fiction writers and those who, like Junichiro Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata, tend to reflect more traditional aesthetics, or those of the “I-novel,” Kobo Abe (1924-1993), a Marxist, is the first significantly modern Japanese novelist. His childhood in Manchuria helped him to look harder and more objectively than other writers at modern Japanese life, particularly in Tokyo, where Abe lived the rest of his life, while his growing up in Manchuria surely added to the sense of alienation that pervades his work. His early stories following World War II already express a profoundly existentialist angst and absurdity that has often led to his being compared to Kafka, Camus, Sartre, or Samuel Beckett. To my mind, though, it is precisely the fact that Abe is Japanese that is important and to view him as a mere imitator of the West would be a mistake. Rather than casting his experience into Kafkaesque terms, he is responding to his own experience of modern Japanese life. I believe Westerners need to think deeply about what that means for modern Japan, especially those dreamy Westerners who romantically idealize the traditional image of medieval Japan, as though it still exists.

In the short story “Magic Chalk” (1950), Abe tells the tale of “a poor artist named Argon.” Flat broke and starving, Argon discovers in his shabby apartment a piece of red chalk with which he mindlessly draws pictures of food and dishes on the wall. Falling asleep, he groans, “I’ve got to eat!” Suddenly, he is awakened by the sound of food and crockery crashing to the floor: “The pictures he had chalked on the wall had vanished.” Seeing food all around, he eats his fill and reflects, “the laws of the universe have changed.” He then draws a bed, since he lacks one, as well as other furniture and food. The realization hits him that he can create an entirely new world and spends four weeks contemplating just how to do it. Driven to despair by the burdensome responsibility, he finally decides merely to draw a door to the new world, but upon opening it finds, “an awesome wasteland glaring in the noonday sun.” He would have “to draw the world all over again” and begins with Eve, “stark naked,” to whom he identifies himself as Adam and “also an artist, and a world planner.” Eve, however, borrows his chalk, draws a gun, and shoots him. Other people in the building hear the gunshot: “By the time they ran in, Argon had been completely absorbed into the wall and had become a picture”:

“After everyone left, there came a murmuring from the wall. ’it isn’t chalk that will remake the world . . .’ A single drop welled out of the wall. It fell from just below the eye of the pictorial Argon.” (tr. Alison Kibrick)

Writing shortly after World War II, Abe understands modern Japan has lost something of immense value, and a mere artist can not replace it.

In Kobo Abe’s masterpiece The Woman in the Dune (1962), the protagonist Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist, travels to the seaside to collect specimens. He happens on a village built in the midst of the dunes with houses at the bottom of huge craters or cavities of sand. Peering down into one of the cavities at a small house “submerged in silence,” he muses, “no matter what they did . . . there was no escaping the law of the sand.” This “law” soon becomes clear when village men trick him into going sixty feet down in a cavity to spend the night at an old woman’s house. Before long, he realizes that there is probably no way to get back out. The “ceaselessly flowing sand,” “this shapeless, destructive power,” which “had no form” of its own, was continually pouring down on the little house threatening to destroy it and bury its occupants alive. Every night the woman shovels sand into baskets which the village men haul up by rope and carry away, just enough to prevent their suffocation. Watching her, Niki Jumpei remarks, “you’ll never finish, no matter how long you work at it.” Later, the narrator explains, “the only certain factor was its movement; sand was the antithesis of all form.” Despite his many appeals for help from the village men, the village benefits from the sand being fought back and they refuse to permit him to leave.

The men, however, are careful to provide the woman and man with the necessities of life as long as they continue to perform the nightly work of clearing back the everdrifting sand of reality, for the sand is manifestly symbolic. Upon his request, they even give Jumpei a newspaper. Reading the usual headlines of political, business, and domestic crimes and intrigues, Jumpei thinks,

“There wasn’t a single item of importance. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. . . . And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home.”

This “illusion” is not the illusion of Buddhism, the floating world of Genji symbolizing a world of spiritual import. It is the illusion of everyday life through which the nihilist sees “the meaningless of existence,” at last confronted, the real truth of human experience. “The world,” Abe has Jumpei say in a simile, “is like sand.” Modern Japanese writers have found the transition easy to make from the illusion of samsara to the illusion of nihilism which is quotidian reality. Similarly, the old woman turns out not to be so old after all, and Jumpei learns social customs are merely illusions too, as he rapes her brutally and repeatedly while she at times enjoys or submits to it. When the opportunity for escape finally comes, drained of all inner meaning, strength, and purpose, he no longer has the will to leave.

In the story “Beyond the Curve” (1966), Abe writes about a man who, while climbing up a hill, comes to a halt before a curve in the road:

“For the life of me, I couldn’t visualize what lay beyond the curve. . . . I knew perfectly well that beyond the curve was the town on the hilltop where I lived. My temporary lapse of memory in no way altered the fact of its existence.”

He stands there agonizing in his mind about what might or ought to be around the curve until he is overcome by anxiety, fearing “the town’s very existence would fade away and then vanish.” He considers, “I myself was no longer myself, but some mysterious other.” Nausea overtakes him. He manages to turn around and walk back down the hill. His “old confidence was gone.” Taking refuge in a coffee shop, he wonders, no longer sure, who he is since he has forgotten his name and where he works. Frantically fumbling with the contents of his wallet and pockets, looking for clues, he realizes, “I had mislaid . . . myself.” Abe expresses here not only the universally modern sense of existential void but especially the Japanese fear of the loss of traditional identity under the onslaught of modernity. Abe’s persona significantly and desperately says, “Until I found that town beyond the curve, there could be no resolution.” And so it is for modern Japan. He takes a taxi up the hill, beyond the curve:

“Spatially, the town had a solid physical existence, but temporally, it was a vacuum. It existed–yet horribly, it had no existence whatever . . . the town I knew was gone.”

Though seeking answers from others, he “alone was lost, uncomprehending.” Physically, materially, like the West, Japan exists; in terms of social or psychological time, the “vacuum,” quintessentially the same as in the West, has swallowed everything: “The town I knew was gone.” What lies beyond the curve, if anything, remains to be seen.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: existentialist, Japan, Japanese, Junichiro Tanizaki, Kobo Abe, Literature, Magic Chalk, The Woman in the Dunes, Tokyo, Yasunari Kawabata

16 Jul 11 Vendor of Sweets. R. K. Narayan.

R. K. Narayan

The Vendor of Sweets.  R. K. Narayan.

India’s Kali Yuga…. December 21, 2000

The novelist R. K. Narayan (1906-2001) was born into a Tamil-speaking, Brahmin family. For several years he attended Christian schools in Madras, where he was raised by his grandmother, a devout Hindu who taught him the traditional songs and prayers. His fiction often presents a persona who undergoes a crisis that drives him back in some way to a resolution suffused with an evocation of the Hindu past. Often portrayed as a simple pious Hindu, R. M. Varma, of the University of Jodhpur, more insightfully observes, “Cultural ambivalence is a marked characteristic of Narayan’s fictional technique and he hovers between his Hindu faith and lack of it. He merely uses it as a landscape in his fiction.”

In his brilliant The Vendor of Sweets (1967), Narayan presents a character named Jagan who owns a small shop that sells sweetmeats. Presented as somewhat of a religious crank, he is a follower of Gandhi who still works his spinning wheel and sits in his shop reading the Bhagavad Gita in between customers. Jagan lives in an idealized traditional India of long ago incongruously conflated with the modern present.

Jagan’s only son Mali fully lives in the modern world, not only of India but of America as well. Dropping out of college, as Jagan had as a young man out of misconstrued loyalty to Gandhi, Mali, without consulting with his father, enrolls in a creative writing program in Michigan and helps himself to Jagan’s attic stash of rupees in order to pay his expenses. Narayan consistently portrays Mali as a son who has lost all the traditional Hindu virtues while Jagan spoils him and makes excuses for him.

After three years in America Jagan abruptly receives a cable announcing Mali’s return with “another person” whom upon arrival at the train station he introduces as his wife, Grace. Jagan suffers a severe shock. His son has not only gone to America, where he in fact does begin to eat beef, but married there without informing his family. Further disoriented because the girl is a Korean-American, Jagan thinks she is Chinese and reflects, “Don’t you know that one can’t marry a Chinese nowadays? They have invaded our borders. . . .” Having stopped reading the Bhagavad Gita while receiving letters he believed were from Mali in America, but were actually from Grace, Jagan starts reading it “becoming mentally disturbed once again.” Narayan subtly dramatizes his reading of the Gita as linked to his disturbed relationship with his son and thereby with modern India. Before long Grace, his new daughter-in-law, begins to take charge of the house and care for Jagan, his wife having died while Mali was in America. Soon she transforms the part of the nineteenth-century house in which she and Mali live with modern Western paintings and furnishings.

In one of the few revealing statements by Mali, “with a gesture of disgust,” he says to his father, “Oh, these are not the days of your ancestors. Today we have to compete with advanced countries not only in economics and industry, but also in culture.” Satirizing the trash creative writing programs churn out in America, Narayan underscores simultaneously the gulf between father and son, traditional and modern.

Shock upon modern shock rolls over Jagan. His son not only lived unmarried with a foreign woman of mixed descent in his ancestral home but shamelessly concealed it from his father. As Jagan explains to the cousin, “Even my grandfather’s brother, who was known to be immoral, never did this sort of thing.” His “dirtied” home, “which had remained unsullied for generations, had this new taint to carry.” Since all of Jagan’s traditional, conventional relations have already “ostracized him” over the “beef-eating Christian girl for a daughter-in-law,” Jagan realizes they would “remove themselves further” should they learn of the “latest development.” In a significant moment of honesty, Jagan observes he “felt grateful for being an outcast, for it absolved him from obligations as a member of the family.” Jagan sits in the dark by the Sir Frederick Lawley statue, a relic from the British past, and meditates on his own arranged marriage in a richly embellished chapter that brilliantly evokes the traditional marriage customs of the joint family system in India and devastatingly insinuates the decayed state of his own house and modern India.

Jagan awakens in the dawn from his night of memories, fantasizing again of entering “a new janma.” In regard to the traditional ceremony marking a man turning sixty, the narrator honestly concedes again that Jagan himself “had had his fill of these festivals.” In his own way, the narrator frequently intimates, Jagan has picked over and repudiated various customs from the past. So one relative is imagined as saying how could the son Mali be different with “a father like Jagan.” Narayan suggests a subtle, logical, and culminating connection of decline between father and son.

The values of the Ramayana and other sacred texts have no resonance for Mali. Jagan, lost and faltering, unable to cope fully with the clash of his traditional values with the modern world, resolves absurdly to retreat across the river, taking his bank book with him, after agreeing to pay for a lawyer for Mali and offering an airline ticket for Grace to return to America: “It’s a duty we owe her.”

V. S. Naipaul has remarked of Narayan’s The Vendor of Sweets that it is “a novel in which his fictional world is cracked open, its fragility finally revealed, and the Hindu equilibrium . . . collapses into something like despair.” In his “On Alternative Modernities,” Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar has similarly observed, “Everywhere, at every national or cultural site, the struggle with modernity is old and familiar.” Narayan has so thoroughly undermined and complicated Jagan with the tensions of twentieth-century life, deep within the structure of the narrative voice itself, only the most shallow or tendentious reading can fail to perceive the scathing critique of both the antedated and bankrupt, traditional and modern, values of India and Western civilization.

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: Bhagavad Gita, Gandhi, Hindu, Hinduism, India, Indian, Literature, Ramayana, The Vendor of Sweets, V. S. Naipaul

15 Jul 11 Saul Bellow. Ravelstein. Allan Bloom.

Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow. Ravelstein. Allan Bloom.

The Closing of the American Soul.
November 23, 2009.

When Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein was published in 2000, I did not rush out and buy a copy but closely followed the many reviews that began to appear. I had read almost all of Bellow’s work up to his last novel but felt for some reason that the time was not right to readRavelstein, despite my having ravenously devoured Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind when it had been published in 1987, and anything related to it. I trusted my intuition and attended to other interests, while more reviews continued to come out. Occasionally, I would stumble on one and read it, thinking Ravelstein was a book that I’d have to read someday. Then in 2005 I bought a copy when I happened upon it in a bookstore, but I didn’t read it. I put it on a shelf, waiting for the right moment. This fall, a year and a half into working on writing an epic poem, I realized I needed Saul Bellow’s help. I needed to know how things really stood with the Jews. Even more thanCommentary Magazine, I knew I could count on Saul Bellow to tell me the truth. He never lied to me in the past. I remembered Ravelstein and retrieved it. The right moment in the life of my soul had come.

After reading Ravelstein, I reread most of the articles and reviews I had been collecting for years. I was struck by the shoddiness of the typical piece of writing published in national newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. Schools of journalism might provide their students with a modicum of technical training but certainly are not capable of cultivating the necessary sensibility to read and understand a subtle and complex literary creation, while English departments, under the rigor mortis of Deconstruction theory and the like, have abandoned and betrayed literature and poetry, rendering many of their students incapable of even writing a clear, intelligible sentence. The review that interested me was by a writer, Cynthia Ozick, who insightfully perceives what Saul Bellow is about, though she only touches on Bellow’s ruminations on the soul in passing, in The New Republic, “‘Soul’ being his most polemical term.” These curious facts fascinate me and convey something very important about the present state of cultural affairs. We have lost the soul and few can even recognize it. Few are willing to discuss it.

Many of the thirty or more reviews focus on the surface layers of Ravelstein, emphasizing it’s a roman-a-clef; that is, the characters correspond to real people, Allan Bloom, as Abe Ravelstein, and Chick, as Saul Bellow himself. But the novel is much more than that, much more than mere biography. Ozick is very perceptive about that fact, unlike the journalistic hacks so much of the media presents as “reviewers.” Much is sensationally made of Bellow’s disclosing Bloom’s homosexuality and death from AIDS, as though that really amounted to everything in terms of the book. Technical critiques, plot summaries, gossip, and so on, all substitute for understanding and interpretation. Bellow tells us what the book is about if only we’ll listen, remain open and sensitive to detail.

Abe Ravelstein, a university professor of political philosophy, though Chick at times dismisses him as such, achieves the rarest kind of success, a best selling book that turns him into a millionaire, Allan Bloom’s own intellectually demanding book, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy, and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987):

He had gone over the heads of the profs and the learned societies to speak directly to the great public. There are, after all, millions of people waiting for a sign. Many of them are university graduates (48).

Only “The great public” is worthy of a writer’s aspiration. We live in a time when most writers are content to settle for a low, narrow, constrained, academic audience, a coterie, made up solely of people in university circles, “creative” writing programs, and so on, preaching to the choir. Allan Bloom and Bellow chose humanity, in all its plenitude, as much as could listen and understand, at a high and demanding level, as had Rabelais, Cervantes, and Shakespeare. The university does not captain the great ship of literature. Poets, playwrights, and novelists are the trustees of the literary tradition, not academicians. They are the last people poets should be writing for. The secondary crowd of secondary scholars write secondary things and achieve only secondary results. During the last eighty years, since the New Criticism, the Age of Criticism has only continued to devolve into ever more effete and alienated theories of life and literature, which have nearly sunk the great ship. American English departments have proven themselves unworthy stewards of the literary tradition, of what is noble in human nature, in the great public.

In the novel, Ravelstein admits that Chick had suggested the idea of writing the book, believing Ravelstein only had to write up all his lecture notes to achieve a popular success. The interplay of their two characters shapes and structures the entire book, with Bellow often provocatively emphasizing the contrasts. Once Ravelstein dies, the novel continues because it is about the ideas of Bloom, their critique, and not the mere memoir Ravelstein had wanted. For in the end, it’s the differences between Ravelstein and Chick that count in the overall meaning of the book and in the meaning of the resolution about life and death. Another significant theme is their reflections on the “viciousness” of modern history, as demonstrated by the Nazi treatment of the Jews and other Eastern European atrocities. Ravelstein helps Chick to come to understand the dark side of history and humanity—“viciousness was universal.”

Yet Chick informs the reader at one point that he is not writing about Ravelstein’s ideas on the political philosophy of Western civilization since Plato, though Ravelstein thought he was essentially commissioning Chick to write a memoir of his life, believing Chick has the literary gift for it. The fact is, however, that Bellow does write about Allan Bloom’s ideas, indeed, critiques them, as well as Bloom’s life. In his treatment of Ravelstein, Bellow goes right to the core of Bloom’s shortcomings, both as a thinker and as a man, which is not to say that Bellow doesn’t give Ravelstein credit for his contribution to “the correct ordering of the soul.” The original title of Ravelstein’s book, Chick explains, was “Souls Without Longing,” the Platonic longing for fullness of being, as in Plato’s Symposium and Aristophanes, “the missing portion to complete” our highest, true self.

Repeatedly Chick discloses that Ravelstein is an atheist, a secular, assimilated Jew, hates his own father and family, fails to love his neighbors, is dying of AIDS, and other unfavorable, contradictory elements of his character and life. In recruiting Chick, Ravelstein had told him, “I want you to show me as you see me, without softness or sweeteners.” If those were Allan Bloom’s actual words, he was a brave man to invite America’s greatest modern novelist to show him warts and all and definitely got what he asked for. Chick, interested in the “chicks,” the real passions of life, more so than abstract ideas, now with his second wife, is advised by her, Rosamund, that Chick should “leave it to others to comment on his ideas,” meaning Ravelstein’s ideas. He responds, “Oh, I intend to. I’m going to leave intellectual matters to the experts,” which resonates with a deceptive irony that ought to tip off any sensitive reader. Saul Bellow often had little respect for academic “experts.” I’ve already mentioned he dismisses Ravelstein at times as a mere professor, a teacher.

Bellow is actually writing about the soul and the afterlife and chastens the failure of Allan Bloom to give them both their proper due. In one discussion of Platonic longing, Chick mockingly states, “Ravelstein was in real earnest about this quest driven by longing.” Ravelstein looked for longing in his students, acquaintances, and friends. Chick describes himself as a Jew, though engaged and struggling with modernity, with religious conceptions implicitly within the more customary framework of Judaism. On the other hand, Ravelstein, the learned professor, is out on the edge, in every way, with “his esoteric system,” almost counter-culture, like the students he criticizes in his book. By critiquing the life of Ravelstein, Bellow is critiquing the ideas of Allan Bloom, at a very deep level, for Bloom’s book ultimately reflects its author’s secular and atheistic outlook, even while it appears to affirm the transcendent values of Plato and the Greeks. Chick rams this home when he says, “for most of mankind the longings have, one way or another, been eliminated.” Ultimately, this is just as true of the picture Chick paints of Ravelstein, “portrays,” he self-deprecatingly puts it, and is Bellow’s deepest criticism of him.

Near the end of the book in Chick’s reflections on the afterlife, Chick reveals that even the brilliant atheist Abe Ravelstein, when confronted with the impending seriousness of death, accepted that there must be an afterlife. By then, Ravelstein had moved on from Greece and Athens to Jerusalem. Chick recounts earlier in the novel his memories as a child being intensely struck by the vivid experience, the “first epistemological impressions,” of the sheer miracle of life, “the pictures,” as he phrases it, of existence, his “intimate metaphysics.” When Ravelstein, facing death from AIDS, asks Chick what he imagines death would be like, Chick answers it would mean the pictures would stop, which Ravelstein respectfully broods on. Chick reflects,

No one can give up on the pictures—the pictures might, yes they might continue. I wonder if anyone believes that the grave is all there is. No one can give up on the pictures. The pictures must and will continue. If Ravelstein the atheist-materialist had implicitly told me that he would see me sooner or later, he meant that he did not accept the grave to be the end. Nobody can and nobody does accept this. We just talk tough (222).

Striking at the heart of Allan Bloom’s ideas, Saul Bellow reveals their weakest point, standing no more on a sure foundation, for all of Bloom’s formidable intellectual accomplishment, than all the modern nihilists Bloom denounces. For Chick had earlier revealed, while discussing the pictures at length, that he, unlike Ravelstein,“had no intention, however, of removing, by critical surgery, the metaphysical lenses I was born with.” Socratic “longing” is not enough and cannot alone restore the soul, neither for the individual nor the modern world, yet the scale of values made possible for Bloom a historical position from which he could critique modernity, but proved untenable when confronted with the grave.

In 2002 in an interview with Antonio Monda, published in Do You Believe (2007), available online on The Jewish Daily Forward, Bellow laconically answers the point-blank question “Do you believe in God?” with one word: “Yes.” He dismisses further discussion, believing “it’s a subject whose importance is diminished by conversation.” A few years earlier, in 1999, Norman Manea interviewed Bellow, published eventually in 2007 in Salmagundi. The long, wide-ranging interview covers Bellow’s life and personal views on many issues. In it Bellow states,

I stopped arguing with myself about belief in God. It’s not a real question. The real question is how have I really felt all these years, and all these years I have believed in God; so there it is. What are you going to do about it? So it’s not a question really of the intellect freeing itself from bondage, it’s the question, first of all, of trying to decide whether this is bondage and then just accepting what you believe because that’s all you can do by now (161).

Like Chick, and in the end even Ravelstein, Bellow didn’t believe “the pictures stop.”  As with all of Saul Bellow’s books, his probings at the soul of modernity is at the core of Ravelstein, and at the core of Chick’s criticism of Bloom’s ideas, of the groundless, unsustainable ideas of modernity. And so even Bellow near the end of his life could honestly acknowledge to Norman Manea that his earnestness “was more an experience of nostalgia for me than it was a spiritual reality.” Yet the cloying political correctness of our secular, nihilistic age and the journalists, academicians, and writers so caught up in rigid adherence and obeisance to the ruling orthodoxy of scientism, do not know what to make of a serious writer like Bellow who has the temerity actually to believe in and write about God, and such spiritual matters as the afterlife. Many choose to ignore this part of his work. This is the state of the human soul that is still with us, even as it has demonstrated so fully its bankruptcy as a vision of life in every department of human endeavor. Beyond the stale ideas of modernity, Bellow’s down-to-earth answer to the ideas of Allan Bloom, as in an interview, quietly affirms, “all these years I have believed in God; so there it is.”

 

Tags: Allan Bloom, American, Antonio Monda, Closing of the American Mind, Cynthia Ozick, Fiction, Jews, Norman Manea, Ravelstein, Saul Bellow

11 Jul 11 To My Opposite Number in Texas.

Daniel Rifenburgh

To My Opposite Number in Texas. May 2, 2010

A Review of Daniel Rifenburgh’s Advent: Poems. The Waywiser Press. London, 2002.

Daniel Rifenburgh studied with Donald Justice and Richard Wilbur, with the latter providing an Introduction to Rifenburg’s only book of poems, Advent. Though not mentioned on the book flaps or in Wilbur’s introduction, Rifenburgh, whom I’ve come to know through Facebook, was, he tells me, a student of the poet Robert Hayden, when he was a visiting professor of poetry at the University of Louisville during the spring semester of 1969. Since I myself had been a student of Hayden’s at the University of Michigan a decade later, I was delighted to communicate with someone else who had also studied with him. We exchanged a number of messages. I ordered a copy of Advent and he mentioned he had ordered a copy of my book, The Grove of the Eumenides, which includes my essay “Robert Hayden in the Morning Time.” He remarked “Hayden got me a creative writing scholarship,” but he had never bought his Collected Poems, which seemed odd to me. If I had studied with anyone of Hayden’s ability, though I don’t know who that would have been, I would have at least read all his work and chosen to own his books. It’s a pity that Rifenburgh didn’t. He might have found much that would have helped in both form and content.

Though I have never cared for most of the poetry of either Richard Wilbur or Donald Justice, finding them small academic poets, campus poets, writing usually on narrow, personal, limited subjects, I thought I’d not hold that against Daniel Rifenburgh and tried to give an impartial reading to his poems, when Advent arrived. The Note on the Author informed me that Rifenburgh had spent three years in Vietnam after his study at the University of Louisville, which made me recall Hayden’s bemoaning in poignant poems and prose his students “brutalized” in that conflict, wondering if he might have had Rifenburgh in mind among them. Wilbur’s introduction didn’t impress me at all, nor did his citing some lines from Rifenburgh, which included, “Wandering between the Word and its infinite extension.” I can respect a poet who believes in Jesus Christ and whatever historically evolved denomination or persuasion he or she chooses, or dissents from. I am not entirely unsympathetic at all. I stem from a long line of Christians of many denominations. Christianity is a humane, spiritual, and true vision of life, when not corrupted by human beings, which is the problem, since we seem to have the capacity to vitiate everything. I even find Christianity infinitely preferable to Marxism, capitalism as a religion, and the other endless substitutes for transcendence that modernity has and does produce. I’m well aware that by saying all of that I’ve violated numerous sacred doctrines, religious and secular, but must be honest before my own conscience, and what I actually found and think about Rifenburgh’s poems.

Getting past the first poem was the problem. I can’t even take it seriously in terms of what it’s saying. “To My Opposite Number in Samarkand” is in epistolary form, addressed to someone in the East, who hears, “The gong inside the old Buddhist temple,” and the call to prayer from “The high towers of the mosques.” Nearby, the reader is told, stands “the lone orthodox church, unevangelistic.” One senses there’s a severe judgment in the word “unevangelistic,” less than full sympathy with Eastern Christianity. Rifenburgh, I should explain, lives in Texas, perhaps known more for evangelism than the high church style, and maybe that influences his word choice. After allusions to Dante, Virgil, and Parmenides, the persona seems to take refuge in poetry, which is a thoroughly modern gesture, time honored for over a hundred and fifty years. What poet can quibble with that? Yet, an ersatz, nonetheless, and even Matthew Arnold knew and understood it as such. To his credit, so does Rifenburgh. He soon turns to the lines quoted by Richard Wilbur, after remarking on the overwhelming experience of reading Montale,

Or, so it seems, in the afterglow of such reading,

As if light had an enduring stepchild in the world

Wandering between the Word and its infinite extension,

Finding play in the interstices and lacunae

Where even breath must pause

In its tally of declensions

And what enters then by a grace

Commands our strictest reverence.

His “strictest reverence,” for the Word, is further implied in the closing stanza, in which he writes to his “Opposite Number,” to speak in the ear of the Boddhisatvas, by implication all the Ways of Opinion, “Parmenides.” The subordinate clause, “if you’re able,” slips in a derisive note, sticking the interlocutor right in the guts, if he hasn’t gotten it by now. In another poem, Herman Melville receives similar treatment, which I think constitutes a misunderstanding of Melville’s complexity: “call it a lack,” “a bible would do him little good.”

“To My Opposite Number in Samarkand” and the last one in the book are clearly intended as “bookends,” if you will, that frame the poems in between of mostly much broader range, with many on Rifenburgh’s experiences in Texas and South America. His sequence of poems titled “Andean Music,” for instance, explores his time working as a newspaper reporter in Latin America and Peru. I was struck in particular with the poem “VI. El Condorito,” about “Che Ernesto,” not the Marxist hero, but a local person known for flying down from the mountains of Macchu Picchu in a hang-glider. Later, together, they “headed, in the dark before the dawn, up to the sacred city.” Such poems are the best of his work, involved with life. In terms of other poems, Aristotle in his Poetics emphasized one of the crucial abilities of the poet was to choose the right material to work with. Rifenburgh often seems to me to lack such a sense of decorum, though our times may tend not to like that old tag. It is something poets forget and neglect at their peril. And it is always a temptation for the poet to write with his or her doctrine in mind and not the heart.

The last poem of the book is the title poem, “Advent,” and the reader is meant to feel the weight of the book leading up to it, emphasizing its importance to Rifenburgh. After describing a rainy day and the material decay of various leaves, he writes,

The mind, too, sheds a tattered cloak

And recalls elements of the old story:

The hoop round the omphalos of Christ, Marian,

The cold coin imprisoning Caesar,

A tocsin of alarm dilating the pupils of Herod,

And now the heart shunts the oil

Of incarnation out of its chambers again

In time with the last drumbeats of the rain.

We defeat the world through surrogates, and but briefly,

While placid beasts feed in drizzling pastures,

Building strength for the flight into Egypt,

Yet the son must be born in us, says the Father,

Or wither, when new oil floods the ventricles

And we become, however briefly, His surrogates

Or betrayers.

And for this, in Winter’s dead zero,

We must sing, sing Hallelujah.

The choice laid before the reader is the exclusivism of truth, for, from whatever perspective, this truth is the Truth, either we are “His surrogates / Or betrayers.” Some Muslims, Jews, and others might say essentially the same thing about their own religion. Influenced by the commonly shared Old Testament, the Western world, especially, has a penchant for this kind of approach to whatever the word “religion” means. Not a new idea, nothing tricky about it, just straight out in your face. I like that. Some Christians enjoy it as “scandalous.” That’s fine. That helps me know where I stand. And I respect Rifenburgh’s conscience, conviction, and interpretation. I stand with his “Opposite Number in Samarkand,” and I am proud of it. Rifenburg’s subject is as fit for poetry as anything else, and I don’t find it offensive, just out of touch with all of human history and religious experience, especially the last five-hundred years. Both religious and secular exclusivisms do that to people. They can keep people isolated from other equally valid traditions of the meaning and purpose of life, often not that different at the core from Christianity or an enlightened humanism, if one can be fair and open about it, make the brotherly effort to understand. Rifenburgh exhibits no such openness but continues along the line of what he had stated in the first poem, “Parmenides was right, / None of this exists!” Many Christian denominations have wisely moderated their thinking and teaching beyond caustic, dismissive either/or’s.

Writing off the history and religious experience of much of the world is perhaps not an entirely efficacious approach for any human being, especially a poet, who must be open to all that is human, if he is truly to serve the Muses, the daughters of Zeus, the sacred servants of All. Had Rifenburgh read Robert Hayden’s poetry years ago he would have found a much more open and universal perspective on life than he has spent his minor talent on. Toward universality, not exclusivism, is where the Divine Being, the Lord of history, has been guiding, and continues to guide, humankind. All peoples are able. In the light of the fullness of the literary tradition, which includes all nations and peoples, poets should encourage humanity to choose to travel together and be tolerant of their fellow human beings. We are all human, fallible, and not a one of us has ever had, or ever will have, the entire Truth, though it is human to think otherwise. At a time when it can seem some people in the United States and elsewhere are pushing toward religious fascism or secular utopia, it might help to step back from the brink and reflect on the healthy effect that pluralism and tolerance have had on civilization. People around our small planet need to value pluralism and universality more, not less.

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: Advent, Aristotle, Christianity, Daniel Rifenburgh, Donald Justice, Evangelism, Pluralism, Richard Wilbur, Robert Hayden, universality

25 Jun 11 A Decade of Disaster. Lu Wenfu.

Lu Wenfu

The Gourmet and Other Stories of Modern China. Wenfu Lu.

A Decade of Disaster…. June 25, 2000

I want to review The Gourmet and Other Stories of Modern China by focusing on one jewel of a story by Lu Wenfu (1928-), who suffered long and hard from the horrors of the communist regime and understands in his fiction, as in the writings of Fang Lizhi, Wei Jingsheng, and Harry Wu, that Chinese communism’s most egregious crime is its stifling of the human spirit. As a young man, he fought in the Red army against the Koumintang and dreamed of the “happy society” socialism would usher in. Like so many writers, in 1957, he was denounced as a Rightist, during the Hundred Flowers purge and the Great Leap Forward, and sentenced to manual labor to reform his thinking. After three years of running a machine lathe, he was deemed reformed and allowed again to write. Then, in 1965, Mao took China down the violent path of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and Lu Wenfu was once more denounced and sentenced, this time, to the life of a mechanic. He later wrote of his experience during the Cultural Revolution:

“I was ’struggled against,’ forced to confess my crimes and paraded through the streets with a placard around my neck. I was already numb to the pain, and worried about when this disaster for my country would end.”

Finally, in 1969, he was sent out to the countryside where he farmed for several years. For more than a decade, Lu Wenfu wrote nothing until after the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976. What little was left of the traditional culture had been trashed; the ruthless persecution of “stinking intellectuals” like Lu Wenfu had been encouraged by Mao himself; thousands of Taoist and Buddhist temples and relics had been destroyed; millions of lives ruined; perhaps as many as 400,000 individual human beings murdered.

In 1979, Lu Wenfu wrote his brilliant short story “The Man from a Peddler’s Family.” Into it he poured all the sufferings of his life. The story begins with the protagonist, Mr. Gao, reflecting on Zhu Yuanda, a seller of wonton. Thirty-two years ago, Mr. Gao had heard for the first time the sound of his bamboo clapper, announcing the advance down the lane of the little kitchen stove on its carrying pole, figuratively “calling or relating something.” Zhu Yuanda came from a long line of street vendors, generation after generation, reaching back into the distant dynasties. Following in the footsteps of his father, he continues the family trade. At the time, apparently 1947, Mr. Gao is out of regular work and must sit up late at night, in an unheated room, grading student notebooks for a bare existence. After the Beijing Opera let out late, Zhu Yuanda would bring him “a little warmth,” a hot bowl of wonton to his “main customer.” Though formerly friends, after the liberation of 1949, Mr. Gao, now a cadre, considers Zhu beneath him. Occasionally, he would still hear the clapper, “calling, saying something.” Gao remembers, as the Anti-Rightist campaign and Great Leap Forward raged, “I never bought anything from him and I wouldn’t allow my wife or children to go. I believed that buying his things was aiding the spontaneous rise of capitalism.” The Anti-Rightist struggles continue, disturbing Gao, until, in what may be an allusion to Buddhism, he ponders how “The world seemed out of joint.” Lu Wenfu is clearly suggesting there is something more to the business of the clapper than just petty bourgeois capitalism.

Yet Mr. Gao goes through his own internal struggles and battles. For a time he attempts to correct or reform Zhu Yuanda, and later tries to ignore or forget him, hoping to save his own skin from the social upheavals. They had, though, formerly shared “a genuine affection,” one that Gao cannot entirely forget despite his position within the communist order. Back and forth, he meditates on Zhu, finding him sometimes to be a capitalist, at others, one of the proletariat: “And then a thunderclap split the earth. The bugles of the Cultural Revolution were sounded, announcing the end of all capitalism.” Gao himself becomes implicated in the madness and is “publicly criticized and denounced.” He manages to avoid his own destruction but happens past Zhu Yuanda’s house one day to find it and him in the midst of a horde of Red Guards smashing the “Evil Den of Capitalism.” Gao, himself a cadre, knows better. He knows Zhu is a simple, decent man attempting only to feed his father, mother, wife, and four children, by, as he says, “my own efforts.” In brilliant words, Lu Wenfu undercuts with scathing irony the pious, radical beliefs of decades of revolutionaries like Lu Xun, when Gao thinks, of the Red Guard’s destruction of everything Zhu Yuanda owned, “How could a noble theory produce such piracy as this!” The worst offense is when the “wonton carrying-pole was dragged out,” “a thing of exquisite workmanship,” a thing redolent of the past, of the best of Chinese traditions, and shamelessly hacked into splinters. Zhu’s family is reduced “to picking up garbage in the streets” in order to make ends meet. Lest the reader imagine Zhu was an exception, Lu Wenfu emphasizes that the seller of wonton was only one of many on the same street who suffered when he mentions the hot water boiler, the cobbler, the barber, and the flatbread seller as all meeting the same pitiless fate.

Like hundreds of thousands of real human beings, Zhu is sent to the countryside for reeducation. Eight years go by. Gao hears nothing of Zhu. Unexpectedly one day Gao hears that Zhu’s sons are working in a local factory and later that Zhu himself is back. Before leaving, Zhu had given Gao the only thing that had somehow escaped destruction, the bamboo clapper. Gao, imagining he’ll now want to return to his old business, begins to anticipate it. In a moment of fantasy, Gao remembers how as a young man he heard the sound of the clapper coming up the lane and thinks that now people will hear again Zhu Yuanda’s approach: “Their lives, too, demand that there be others bringing them warmth and convenience. It had taken me more than twenty years to learn this elementary lesson.” It had actually taken more than thirty years, and I wonder if Lu Wenfu is not hoping here that China itself has finally learnt the lesson after its “decade of disaster.” I myself am not so sure. No longer interested in his clapper or selling wonton, Zhu longs only for an iron rice bowl for his children and himself. As Zhu leaves, Gao watches him walk down the street and poignantly thinks, “In these past years I and others had hurt him. We had stifled so much spirit.” All the dreams and theories brought to naught by the broken stature of a ruined man. As in other modern Chinese writers, such pathos takes place against a social background intentionally drained of Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist morality and transcendence.

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: China, Chinese communism, Cultural Revolution, Fang Lizhi, Gourmet and Other Stories, Great Leap Forward, Harry Wu, Lu Wenfu, Modern, Wei Jingsheng